Alphabet (GOOGL) is facing pushback from Congress over a $10 million data deal. More than 110 US lawmakers, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Steven Horsford, wrote to Google and Spirit Airlines on October 8. They object to Google’s plan to buy the defunct airline’s internal records to train AI models.
The price is small. The precedent is not: a bankrupt company’s workplace communications sold as AI training data.
What Google Would Get
- The data: about 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and employee records including payroll and timecards, according to the lawmakers.
- The objection: stripping names from a dataset doesn’t make it anonymous, the letter argues.
- Google’s response: it isn’t buying personal information, and that data will be excluded or de-identified by an independent third party before Google receives anything.
- The status: Spirit is selling the data through bankruptcy. A court-appointed consumer privacy ombudsman recommended approval on October 5 after passenger databases were excluded and additional safeguards adopted. Her review did not assess employee privacy risks.
$10 Million Is Under an Hour of Alphabet’s Spending
Alphabet spent $91.45 billion on capital expenditure in 2025. That’s up 74% from $52.54 billion in 2024 and nearly four times the $24.64 billion it spent in 2021. It works out to about $250 million a day, so the Spirit deal costs Alphabet less than one hour of 2025 capex.
The money doesn’t matter. Access does.
Why October 14 Matters for Google’s Data Deal
The bankruptcy judge takes up the sale at an October 14 hearing. Approval, backed by the ombudsman’s recommendation, would give AI buyers a court-tested template for buying distressed companies’ internal data. Conditions like the ones the lawmakers want, such as an independent employee confidentiality review, would make that template slower and costlier to use.
The ombudsman has recommended approval, so that looks like the base case to me. For Alphabet, the conditions could matter more than the price. The thing to watch at the October 14 hearing is whether the judge approves the sale and makes an independent review of employee data a condition of transfer.
Want to see how fast Alphabet’s AI spending is climbing? Pull up the same capex chart on TIKR for free and track it quarter by quarter. Learn more here.
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